Does
The Human Centipede
tell the story of a man who tortures his victims in the basement of a secluded house? Yes. Does the head of the centipede confess, at one point, that he has to go to the bathroom? Uh-huh. And does the evil surgeon respond by throwing up his hands, and crying, "FEED HER! FEED HER!"? Sure. But to call the movie torture porn goes a step too far. For a movie about three people sewn together mouth-to-anus,
The Human Centipede
is surprisingly restrained.

The film has less nauseous gore than you'd find in many mainstream American horror movies, and what scares there are tend to be of the who's-behind-that-door variety. (There's more crying and whimpering than on-screen disembowelment.) The crux of the story
—
that biological interface between one victim and the next
—
is never shown on-screen.

All this may sound like cold comfort, but
—
seriously
—
consider how director Tom Six compares to his fellow horror auteurs. The sadism of
splat-packers
like Eli Roth, James Wan, and Darren Lynn Bousman far exceeds anything on display in
The Human Centipede
.

Let's put things in perspective: Six's monstrous film opens today in
exactly one theater
. Meanwhile, here's a sampling of the genuine torture porn that turns up on a regular basis in suburban multiplexes around the nation:

In
Hostel
, a man is handcuffed to a chair while someone puts holes in him with a power drill. Later a young woman's eyeball gets burned out of her head with a blowtorch, and
snipped off with a pair of scissors
. Goo dribbles out. (2,300 theaters; $80 million.)